From: Rob Sanheim <rsanheim@...>
Date: 2007-01-14T13:09:49+09:00
Subject: Re: checking if a string matches a regexp - am I missing something?

On 1/13/07, James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2007, at 9:43 PM, Rob Sanheim wrote:
>
> > I figure that I must be missing something really obvious with this
> > question.  But here goes:
> >
> > I want to know if a string matches a regular expression.  I don't care
> > where the match begins, I don't want a matchdata object, I don't want
> > to check for nil, I just want a boolean indicating if a string matches
> > a regexp.  And I want this to be one method call.  From what I can
> > tell, this is the closest I can get:
> >
> > ("string" =~ reg) >= 0 # ugly
>
> Just drop the noise:
>
> "string" =~ reg # => int results are +true+ and nil is +false+
>
> Hope that helps.
>

True...but here is a cleaned up version of the place where I tried to do that:

 def valid_query?
 # query is a string accessor
    if query_is_plain_text?
      is_valid = valid_query_length? && (query =~ regex)
    else
      is_valid = query_is_url?
    end
    is_valid
  end

So of course, when it was both a valid query and had a valid length,
it would return zero because it matched the start of the regexp.  The
caller of the method wanted true or false only, not zero.